Without Love
For some reason, NetFlix has automatically rejected my review of this 1945 Tracy/Hepburn film, so I’m dropping my impressions here:
This film is brilliantly overloaded with proven box office talent. Barry plays and Stewart screenplays (customized for Hepburn) bring fascinating questions about open marriage and platonic love from dusty tomes of philosophy and biting literary references to life in the presence of organic modern music and deeply gifted actors. But it doesn’t actually work quite as well as Holiday nor The Philadelphia Story, largely because of the numerous characters and complicated subplots that pull attention in various directions that (don’t really matter much and ) magically resolve in exactly the kind of family-friendly tenderness, optimistic passion and genuine warmth that was telegraphed before the start of principle photography.
Curiously, this film is overburdened with long moments of sparkling wit, extended periods of profoundly meaningful silence, sophisticated charm, deeply adult ideas about companionship, and frequent bursts of comedic brilliance.
It ought to have been the (re)launching platform for a half-dozen amazing post-war careers; and it was, but the film also stands as a testament to all failed attempts to bottle lightning. Sometimes the best ingredients result in flat champagne or fireflies.
This film is a remarkably interesting and engaging disappointment that begs for your careful analysis.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
This 1956 Fox film addresses uniformity in postwar, 1950s, middle class American family life strangely. It touches on the suit. It presents aspects of the inner workings of a couple of nuclear families. It centers around the headquarters of a thriving television network (in TechniColor and CinemaScope). It does these things without actually saying much of anything about them. Conformity?
The cardinal device employed concerns three American women, the wife of the protagonist, the wife and daughter of the protagonist’s CEO. Each of these women is glimpsed in surprisingly ugly profiles as bitter, intractable, demanding and fundamentally infantile…yet each is duly worshipped for reasons that aren’t remotely explained in the film.
James Monaco’s commentary track led me to think about other things that only tangentially relate to this odd little big-budget pointless film. He mentioned that ABC was a latecomer to the 50s television industry. Competing with NBC and CBS which were prosperous radio-broadcasting networks based in New York. West Coast-based ABC’s problems with funding resulted in alliances with Disney and Warner Brothers Studios. The liaison between the upstart television broadcaster and movie studios resulted in a philosophical production rivalry. Live entertainment from New York’s wealth of theatrical and radio talent was vastly more expensive than recorded television produced in keeping with the Hollywood tradition of archival presentation/representation of entertainment designed to control access by the audience.
The more cost-effective model won, and the East Coast television broadcast industry moved west, modelling itself after ABC. The decline of live television, conventional radio shows, even Broadway theatrical presentation owe their loss of audience-attention to the success of ABC and the resurgence of Hollywood studio power as the West Coast system converted its success in cinema archives to archival television broadcasting.
The natural evolution of complex, serial, longform narrative was likewise retarded by the preeminent emergence of the ABC model of television production because weekly, self-contained 30 or 60minute episodes were deemed more salable (to network affiliates [in syndicated, non-consecutive representation] than treating programs as wholes). And the revolutionary countermeasures employed by Hollywood to overcome the threat of East Coast television (CinemaScope, stereophonic sound and TechniColor) were likewise deemed by the studios to be less cost effective than constraints imposed by utilization of the existing television medium (4:3 aspect ratio, monaural sound and grayscale). Rather than continuing competition with the innovative opportunities potentiated by the television medium for the attention of audiences, studios simply muted the importance of color television, stereo sound and widescreen presentation until that stuff enhanced the value of products owned and controlled by studios.
And that’s why The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a TechniColor CinemaScope film in stereo was created in 1956 to draw audiences into theaters yet hasn’t seen much broadcast time until the advent of DVDs when audiences can witness top-flight actors meandering through a pointless story. It wasn’t about storytelling, but specifically designed to present viewers with an ultimatum that denigrated television in favor of the more engaging medium of cinema. The studios succeeded, not by revolutionizing film production, but by causing television to conform to the will of movie moguls who duly came to own the intellectual properties that fuel both cinema and television. The engine of these changes in the 60 years of television’s ubiquitous popularity is cost-effective production coupled with addictive storytelling that collects eyeballs and glues butts to seats while starving culture of value and meaning.
That mercenary agenda has very little interest in the cultural significance of useful, innovative, meaningful storytelling. It’s about making money. Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Heroes and LOST are prime examples of studio products that don’t rely on dynamic storytelling to garner audience attention to meaningful stories. They’re the result of ABCs success in subverting two forms of media that might have taught us much more about our world than Edward R. Murrow feared would serve the interests of the captains of mainstream media. Murrow was right. We’ve been wronged.
Nothing I’ve said here is substantiated by research. It’s purely speculative opinion.
The Man in The White Suit
This 1951 Ealing comedy is a perfect film that’s perfectly executed. It invents a perfect synthetic fabric and populates the narrative with characters whose imperfections polymerize into the antithesis of the putative aspirations of industry, labor and the common man; criminally empty platitudes about development and progress.
The creation of an incredibly strong fabric that repels dirt, never wears out and practically can’t be cut sounds like the ultimate invention of the textile industry, but results in ever-widening circles of absolute and perfect panic as the people in the film who represent capital, labor and customers come to see this product as the terminating element in their practice of business-as-usual. Squabbling, pomposity, the vapid adherence to ridiculous rules…the flaws in people, traditional practices and mercantile relationships of producers and customers are used as gags to punctuate and illustrate the inutility of perfection in a world governed by absolute fools.
While the creation of this perfect product consumes the first half of the film, the inability of the characters to recognize value in its creator foreshadows the eventual discovery as generous people of vision and penetrating foresight grace the entire presentation with conspicuousness of their absence. A cinematic environment filled with subtle and blatant class-intimidation, stupidity and pathological self-interest perfectly contrast and clash with the altruistic character whose sole intent is to realize the dream product. And the intricate processes by means of which that perfectly-motivated individual achieves the ideal he’s dreamed about are expressed (primarily in pantomime) in this perfect film in perfect gags and situations that proceed at a pace that’s uncommonly rapid in the entire body of conventional (slow-developing) British films.
I always object to the industry use of multiple camera-angles in storytelling, which leads me to believe that this perfect story might have been told even more remarkably by giving Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinnes) a constant (small canine) companion to represent a coherent audience-point-of-view throughout the film. And fluctuations in volume levels (usually involving softspoken women and an incredibly loud, pedantic score) are always disturbing. BUT these inherent flaws in the continuing evolution of 20th Century filmmaking are practically ubiquitous, and don’t significantly detract from the profound enjoyment of a perfect film.
Reproduction
Fifty years ago, when I was nine, I decided not to reproduce. The reasons for this decision were manifold, but they centered on the merits of my parents’ relationship and shortcomings in my reasoning abilities.
This choice at an early age precluded my serious undertaking of courtship, marriage and family, and led me on a solitary path separate and distinct from the programming of mainstream society. It was a good choice.
Looking back on fifty years of a life at variance from the usual, I see a number of flaws in my execution of my end-of-line plan. Most of these involve my failure to take adequate responsibility for contraception in the heat of a lengthy career of profligate inseminations. A more responsible version of me would now devote all of his resources to identifying his fuckups, and caring for any that exist. I won’t do that.
Desk Set
Here’s a 1957 movie about the digital revolution. It stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as a couple of accomplished bachelors whose lives have been dedicated to seemingly-dissimilar pursuits. She’s the primary research librarian for a television network located at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York, and he’s the creator of an early mainframe computer…that’s apparently intended to take over her job. The story revolves around the implicit fear that office automation would inevitably displace millions of people from their places of employment, replaced by terribly efficient and cost-effective machines.
It’s interesting that a half-century has passed and so very little has changed. Business continues to run on the variability, complexity and adaptability of people while longing for the simplicity, reliability and consistency of comparatively inexpensive mechanical intelligence. Offshoring, outsourcing and various methodologies of devaluing the contribution of loyal people to commerce seems to be intrinsic to the pursuit of doing prudent business. Unfortunately, the sterility injected into the souls of working people by this paired search for efficiency and extirpation of humanity from business has the lingering side effect of limiting the degree and quality of engagement with our jobs.
Ultimately, the movie resolves in the belated revelation that the computer was always intended to extend the power and scope of the research librarians, it was never meant to replace them. It’s still the inability of computer experts to explain the intent of their dreams and the traditional inhumanity of employers that justly fuel the (irrational) fears of people who work for a living.
It deserves mention that the DVD commentary for this film could not be much more irrelevant to the plot, themes and the almost-completely invisible competence of the actors. I’m going to watch it again with the sound turned off just to see Tracy animate his character in pantomime:
“Never let them catch you acting.”
Although he’s a bit of an ugly fuck, he’s kind of a joy to watch.
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